Okay, geez, I had written a ton more in this Blogger window, it looked like it was saving my draft, but then it... somehow didn't? Jesus, nothing on computers ever works. All right, I'll try to recreate it:

on Ubuntu, I wanted to pip install as much as possible (because of virtualenv) so I did stuff like this:
sudo apt-get build-dep numpy scipy matplotlib
pip install numpy scipy matplotlib
I think I just used pip for pandas, shapely, pysal, descartes. Fiona required something else, like apt-getting gdal or something?